Todd, Tim and Kellan Cook love Baseball, the Seattle Mariners and trekking around the country to visit stadiums and watch games. These are their stories. #FatherSonBaseball

Results tagged ‘ Swingman ’

Before Wednesday night, I had taken Tim to see Ken Griffey, Jr. play 10 times — 5 times for the Mariners, 4 for the Reds and 1 for the White Sox. Griff played in only two of those games. Only once as a Mariner. That game was, oddly, minor league turn back the clock day. So, prior to Wednesday night, Tim had seen Griff play one game wearing a White Sox uniform and one game wearing a Seattle Rainiers uniform.

Thus, the mission on this night: see Griff play baseball wearing a Seattle Mariners uniform for the first time in Tim’s life.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!

Much more on Griff later.

We started off the day by purchasing the cheapest seats in the house — right field upper deck — at the CF ticket office. We entered the stadium and headed into Section 90 — straight away CF. Tim was sitting on my shoulders and as we entered the seats we were greeted by the beautiful sight of a field full of Mariners taking batting practice and shagging balls.

Within a minute of entering the seats, I heard someone calling out, “Hey, Hey, Hey.” I looked to the right and saw a cop standing down in the grass below the batters’ eye:

This picture of Felix Herdanez warming up in front of the CF Ivy is out of order, but it illustrates the situation. (By the way, isn’t the ivy nice looking for the batters’ eye?)

We were standing in the seats essentially where the guy holding the little kid is standing (above the double doors). I looked down at the cop yelling up at me and I though to myself: “Oh, man, he’s about to tell me to take Tim off of my shoulders.”

I was very wrong. Instead of reprimanding me for toting Tim on my shoulders, the good officer rewarded us with a baseball — a ball I like to think was hit into that grass area as a Mariners BP homerun — most likely a mammoth blast by none other than Mr. Ken Griffey, Jr. (of course that is just wishful speculation…but a guy is entitled to some wishful speculation from time-to-time). Anyway, I will take a baseball over a reprimand any day.

So, after thanking the officer, it was back to watching our Mariners warm up. Its amazing how many Mariners games I watch and yet how many Mariners look totally unrecognizable while wearing a jersey-hiding pull-over. The 3 guys in CF were totally unrecognizable. They must have been recent call-ups. One of them looked like he was 10 years old.

Off toward left CF was base coach Lee Tinsley with a guy who looked a lot like Felix Hernandez, but clearly was not Felix. In my post-game research, I’m pretty confident that it was new call-up Guillermo Quiroz. Anyway, he caught a ball in deep left CF. He had run in our direction to field the ball so it was natural to look toward us before turning to throw the ball in to the bucket. As Quiroz looked up, I flashed my glove and he spotted us. He was about 100 feet away or so. But he motioned to me. He was clearly getting ready to throw us the ball. But then he motions “down, down.” I’m clueless. He yells, “down, down.” I interpret this to mean, “Go down to the first row so the throw is easier.”

We walk down to the front row. Quiroz is walking toward us slowly, but is still at least 50 feet away. He points at Tim and says, “Put him down.” Wow — I’m getting reprimanded by a new Mariner! How could it be? Anyway, I put Tim down and he throws me the ball. He then yells, “I didn’t want to hit your boy.” Well, that’s not a reprimand at all. That’s just plain thoughtful. Looks like Quiroz is a keeper.

We watched a bit more batting practice, but Tim kept asking for ice cream. He explained, “they’re playing baseball. Its time for ice cream.” I explained that they were just practicing and we would get ice cream once the game started.

To tide Tim over, we decided to go to the kids’ play area. Tim played on the play set. He passed up on the bouncy house. But he gave the speed pitch a try for the first time:

I think Tim lit up triple digits on the gun.

Next, we headed back into the stadium and saw Jaime Burke stretching down the 3B line:

Tim yelled, “Hi, Jamie!” Burke turned around and gave Tim a wave, which was nice because every time Tim waves or says hi to a player at a game he ends up asking me, “Can baseball players not hear me?”

I told Burke it was nice to have him back up with the big club. He thanked me.

We watched Burke warm up Felix Hernandez, first in the outfield grass and then in the bullpen:

Felix looked sharp in the bullpen. I was excited to see him pitch tonight. See the guy in the middle picture in the pull-over jacket? That is Jason Phillips the Mariners bullpen catcher. We watched Felix warm up from the seats just behind and to the left of Jamie Burke. Phillips (and at time pitching coach Rick Adair) stood to the right of Burke and watched Felix.

Eventually, Phillips passes in front of Burke and starts walking toward the bullpen bench. He stops in that little corner and starts digging around in that equipment bag behind the chairs. He dug around in there for about 10-15 seconds. Finally, he pulls out a baseball. He turns around and walks a couple feet toward us and threw it to us. Tim immediately told the guy next to us, “We got a baseball!” And then he yelled “thank you” to Phillips.

WOW – three balls with very little effort.

It tied my personal single game record set at a Mariners game at Fenway Park in 2003 when, without moving from the same spot, Mike Cameron, Rafael Soriano and Joel Piniero threw me balls during BP.

There would be no record breaking fourth baseball.

It was game time. With Tim on my shoulders, we headed toward the Mariners dugout just in time for the national anthem:

After the anthem, we looked around. No ushers in sight. Four empty seats in the first row of the dugout, right on the aisle. Why not stay a while? Sure thing.

Mariners photo session ensures:

Ichiro bats:

…Ichi popped out…

…its okay, later he would blast a double high off of the CF wall.

Jason Vargas and Rob Johnson had a view of the game very similar to ours:

Vargas is impressing me so far. I’m hoping he keeps it up.

Vargas’s and Johnsons’s view of Russell Branyan probably looked a lot like this:

All this time, Tim hadn’t forgot about his ice cream. Despite the excellent seats, he wanted ice cream bad. I promised we’d go get ice cream right after Griff hit. I didn’t want us to miss this great view for Tim’s first time seeing Griff hit in a Mariners uniform.

The guy behind us offered to take out picture. But Tim put on his fussy “I need ice cream” face:

Since the M’s went 1-2-3 in the first, we got a chance to see King Felix up close in the bottom of the first before going to get Tim’s ice cream:

Mr. Gold Glove, Adrian Beltre, was there too:

While Felix looked in for the signs, Russell Branyan dried off his glove hand:

And just like that, IT WAS TIME — GRIFFEY TIME:

Look at this beautiful swing:

Folks, that swing is one of two things — a 450 foot home run or a foul straight back. Unfortrunately, this one was the latter. He missed it by a millimeter.

Here is a shot of Tim watching Griff and Ichiro bat:

Right after Griff popped out, we headed up the ailse with our sights set on ice cream (sadly, with no ice cream helmet). By the time we reached the top of the section, we had turned back to the field to watch Jose Lopez go deep for this first of two HRs on the day:

With a 1-0 lead in hand, Tim and I bought some chocolate ice cream and headed toward the RF corner. En route to grabbing some “ice cream seats” (def. seats found exclusively for the purpose of Tim eating his ice cream), for the second game in a row, we ran into MLBlogger Zack Hample wearing a hot pink “real men wear pink shirt.” We shared a few words with Zack before grabbing our ice cream seats. Tim can be seen in the last picture in Zack’s entry for this game — click here.

Tim was ready to dig into that ice cream!

We had a great view of Ichiro from these seats:

As Tim ate his ice cream, a familiar face (and shirt) walked by in the cross ailse behind us. It was The Happy Youngster (a/k/a Nick), of homerun catching fame. Some kind patron took an extremely blurry and generally weird picture of me, Brew Town’s Happy Youngster, and my own happy youngster:

Check out Tim multitasking, posing for a picture while still holding his ice cream spoon in his hand. Nick gave us a shout out (and some very kind words) on his entry for this game — click here.

The rest of the night, I was really hoping a Mariner would hit a HR to right field so I could see Zack and Nick battle for the HR. Here they are in home run territory in a photo I like to call “Dueling Ballhawks”:

Back to the real game, here are Ichiro and Griff batting from our ice cream seats view:

Ichiro hit a double off the CF wall in this at bat. I believe that Griff popped out to third.

You know that big warehouse in RF? You know how many people have hit a ball off of the warehouse in the history of Camden Yards? Its no secret. One man:

In this picture, Griff is laughing and seems somewhat embarrassed because they just showed a video about him hitting the warehouse and it said something like “Legends of Camden Yards”….or something like that.

After Tim finished his ice cream, we headed out to Tim’s favorite spot at Camden Yards – the flag pavillion. I fake pitched about 100 balls to Tim and he fake ran the bases (circled the flags) about 100 times. For most of my fake pitches, I had to chase Tim and try to fake tag him out before he scored at fake home plate. This is Tim’s set Camden Yards routine. His home plate is always the same. This is hit thing at Camden Yards. He loves it. He ran a ridiculous amount. I ran a ridiculous amount. But it was fun.

And Tim was a big hit with the ushers, fans and the beer lady in the corner of the pavillion. Two fans gave Tim little stuffed Chik Fillet cows. The beer lady told me how wonderful Tim was over and over again before she gave him a whole bunch of Orioles baseball cards — she apologized that she didn’t have any Mariners cards.

Well, guess what, one of the ushers did. Check out the Bone:

The final game I saw Jay Buhner play was actually at Camden Yards. So it was nice to see Bone at Camden Yards once again, even if only in the form of a baseball card.

In addition to running the fake bases in the flag pavillion, Tim played a lot of fake catch in the pavillion as well:

Mostly Tim played fake catch with Nick, including some fake fly ball shagging. Nick very kindly played along with Timmers.

Down the RF line in foul territory, there is a section of seating above the main cross aisle that is turned toward the field. That section is right behind our ice cream seats. The section was 95% empty. Tim explored it at length. He ran up and down most of the aisles. He chatted with most of the people in the section. He is a picture of Tim at the top of that section. He was yelling “HI GUYS!!” down to people on Eutaw Street and waving like crazy.

And here is a panoramic view looking toward the field from the same spot:

In the 8th and 9th innings, we went back and sat in the second row behind the Mariners dugout. It was a good spot to witness a big Mariners Win!

With two HRs on the night, the big hero was Jose Lopez who was interviewed in the dugout after the rest of the team cleared out:

As we were getting ready to head for the car, I noticed that Mariners trainer Rick Griffin was standing by the screen behind home plate with two very familiar looking bats. He let me get a close peak and a photo:

Thanks, Rick!

This was truly excellent night in Baltimore. We finally got to see Griff play, which was awesome. Ichiro had a lazer double. Lopez two HRs. Felix was dominant. And Tim had a blast running around the park.

Its always a great time when you go to Camden Yards, but its even better the 3-4 days each season when our Mariners are in town.

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